


rubato

by kittenscully



Series: fictober 2020 [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst and Romance, F/M, On the Run, POV Dana Scully, Post-Episode: s09e19-20 The Truth, or prosaic philosophical musings on the passage of time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:33:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26818873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittenscully/pseuds/kittenscully
Summary: There is no time to gather her thoughts, but somehow, all the time in the world to find the right words.[fictober day 4]
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: fictober 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1949467
Comments: 1
Kudos: 44





	rubato

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "I missed this."

The light from the parking lot is thick, seems tangible and waxy through the blinds, as if it will leave an imprint after it’s gone. It streaks Mulder’s hair, the expanse of his bare shoulders, her own pale thighs, nudged open as he nestles his face into them. 

His breath, hot on her skin. His mouth, tender on the inside of her hip. The moment, open and endless and alight, like the singing of her nerve endings, the thoughts spinning in the corners of her mind. The warm drip of arousal as he roots closer, roughened hands spreading her knees. 

These things will leave an imprint too, impossibly and invisibly, marking every place on her skin he’s touched. They will exist on her body, her psyche, forever, a memory she can live in. A parallel universe alongside the one they will build as they run together. 

She knows this, as surely as she’s ever known anything she can prove. 

And solitude has always laid Scully into a single, linear continuum. Progression, turning, the ticking of the clock. The hours of sleep as robust as the hours awake, every choice habitual and no one to push her off track. 

Even weighed down by grief in the past months, she has found it the same. Brought to her knees, bruised with guilt, eyes closed in prayer as she crawls ever steadily forwards towards judgement. 

The difference, she thinks, is not in the feeling, but in how the knowledge of what she’s missing colors in the minutes, grayscale and heavy. How the reminder of her eventual death is no longer a comfort, with no promise of Heaven to carry her through. How she misses the disappearance of hours in conversation with Mulder, misses the expansion of a single hour spent watching her baby sleep. How the inexorable motion exhausts her.

Now that she has Mulder back, though, time has begun to stretch again. The momentary halting of all movement when he kissed her in his cell. The disorienting surge as they broke him out. The moon-tethered waves of desire as he held her, swelling in her full and round, tugging her towards him as if carried by a current. 

Rubato, slowing and rushing forwards, coming to a stop in this eternal moment as he breathes her in, meets her eyes. 

“I missed this,” he murmurs, voice clouded with emotion, gaze almost bioluminescent in the penetrable dark. “I missed you.” 

There is no time to gather her thoughts, but somehow, all the time in the world to find the right words. Because he has never hurried her, and she has never not loved him, never not found the feeling growing as she mulls it over and over in her head. 

He exists outside of the realm of physics, outside of the linear, and pulls her into logical nonsense alongside him. He comes in peace, sends out homing signals, radio waves broadcast to anyone who knows the right frequency. He finds her like starlight, catching her long lost brightness and charting it, bringing her back to life in folklore and planetariums with wonder in his eyes. 

With him, she is timeless, unaged and beautiful. With him, damnation is a distant, unlikely possibility, guilt just another feeling. With him, she is absolved, adored, absolute. 

With him, she could be immortal. 

“Scully.” 

He calls her back to him, the open anticipation of his mouth so familiar it makes her ache. Her best friend, her broken heart, her one worthy lover. If someone writes her story someday, she thinks it will be only and entirely about him.

She reaches for him in slow motion, cradles his head in her palms. She blinks back a haze of tears, lip trapped between her teeth, and doesn’t say anything at all. 

And then he kisses her, right at the apex of her thighs, and she shifts like sand, pulled under by the tide. 

**Author's Note:**

> My prompt list and all of my work can also be found on tumblr @kittenscully.


End file.
